ghost heartlines
by Gray Doll
Summary: He starts calling her every night, just to hear her say, "Teresa Lisbon, please leave a message," in a happy voice. And he does. He leaves message after message.


**ghost heartlines**

At some point, he starts keeping a list of all the people who have died because of him. The ones he cared about, and the ones he hated. The ones he loved, and the ones he hunted. The list grows and grows until the names blur together and his pen runs out of ink. The names are always set on the forefront of his mind, every second of every day of every week. He closes his eyes and sees letters before a pitch-black screen – letters forming names (Angela, Charlotte, Sam, Nick, Mark, Towlen, Marlon, that killer, that other killer, Ray, Bret, another killer?, Brett, that suspect, and the other suspect, Osvaldo, Robert, another suspect, a little girl? and that other suspect).

He wonders why he hasn't gone insane yet.

(Most nights he ends up thinking he's halfway there.)

* * *

Patrick Jane has discovered that he likes to pace. He wears down the wooden floor of the small apartment he was given when he decided to leave the Airstream, he burns holes in the carpet. He destroys his shoes and his socks and his feet are growing sore with all the pacing, up and down and up and down, because lying on a leather couch has suddenly become too painful.

He stops in his tracks one day after pacing for hours. He looks down at his worn-out socks before he realizes pacing in _these_ socks feels wrong. He yanks them off – Lisbon had bought him these socks when he came back. Lisbon.

He holds the socks tightly in clenched fists, and sinks to his knees.

(Kim comes to his apartment when he doesn't answer any of her dozen phone calls, she comes to his apartment to find him curled on the floor against the wall, dried tear stains on his cheeks, holding the socks in fingers that refuse to let go. She swallows, sighs, and helps him get up and into his bedroom.

He never lets go of the socks.)

* * *

"Stop it," he says harshly, eyes gone wide and glassy.

Cho blinks in surprise, retracting his arm and the cup of tea he'd offered him.

"You love her," he says, voice reprimanding, "how could you do this to her? How could you – how could you let-" he stops talking, eyes pulling back into focus. He stares at Cho like he's not sure how he got to the FBI headquarters, like he doesn't know who the other man actually is.

(Later, it occurs to Cho that maybe Jane hadn't even talking to him after all. Perhaps he had been talking to himself. He can't quite forgive himself for missing the first signs.)

"Uh, Jane?" Cho murmurs cautiously, taking a step towards him.

He steps back, running a hand through his hair. "I have to go. I need to-" he stops again, closing his eyes, his hand now on the bridge of his nose. "I don't know what I need to do," he says finally. Then he turns, and leaves.

* * *

"I haven't lost her," Jane says conversationally. No one is in the room, but he doesn't care. Not really. "I just don't remember where I put her. That's all."

He brings the teacup to his lips, stopping when he realizes it's empty. He sets it back down on the table. "I haven't lost her," he repeats to himself.

* * *

He hears someone say that he has grown paranoid. He sees Abbott and Fischer together, and he wonders if they're talking about him. Cho doesn't always answer his phone calls and he's afraid his old friend has realized he is supposed to hate him.

He sits on the couch of his narrow living room, random things shoved in front of his front door to prevent anyone from getting in and seeing him. He takes a deep breath, staring at the pictures in his hands. The edges are worn and faded, but they're lovely all the same. He brushes his thumb over his daughter's small face, and wonders if he'll loose Lisbon like he lost his family.

_No_, he tells himself, _Lisbon loves you. She'll come back to you. She always comes back, just like you do_.

* * *

He hums to himself, walking happily around the kitchen. There's food stacked on the counter tops, and he's cooked all of his favorite foods in the last three hours.

He stops moving for a moment, standing beside the table and looking around the kitchen. It looks quite clean, despite the considerable amounts of plates and bowls lining the counters; sunlight leaking through the carefully drawn cream-colored curtains; beige and white tiles on the walls; and he can't, for the life of him, remember how he got there.

"Losing your mind?" a lilting voice asks, a little too high-pitched and a little too pleasant to be asking such a question.

He drops the spoon he'd been holding at the sound, hears it clatter to the floor, and spins around.

He doesn't know how to react, at first. In the end, he only blinks once, twice, and lets the air out slowly through his nose. "What are you doing here?"

The man shrugs, tilts his head to the side with a small smile. "You killed me. Where else am I supposed to go?"

* * *

He starts missing cases. He doesn't show up at the headquarters until the sun is high up in the sky. He conveniently misplaces his phone when his colleagues try to get a hold of him.

_What's wrong with me_? He asks himself inwardly, slumping down on his couch and staring at the white wall ahead.

"I don't know," he replies out loud.

He feels more than sees a figure dressed in black sit down heavily beside him, but the couch doesn't shift. Then he hears a sigh. "If I had known your life would be so miserable without me, I would have made sure to kill you quick and easy before starting my evil villain speech. Talking to your corpse would have been just as satisfying, I think."

He laughs. It sounds a bit weird – cracked and hoarse and torn from his lips like a sob, but it's laugh, he's sure of that. "My life is a hundred percent better without you, thank you very much."

He turns a little to the side, to see the other man arch an eyebrow and fold his arms about his chest.

Kim chooses that exact time to come in from the kitchen, balancing a tea cup on a blue saucer, her brows furrowed. "Are you talking to yourself?" she mutters, eyes cautious as she approaches him and sinks down slowly on the couch next to him.

His companion's eyes widen, and he ducks out of the way to avoid being sat on; Jane can't resist the urge to laugh. He laughs loud and with tears, and his hands are shaking so much he drops both the teacup and the saucer when he takes them from Kim.

She stares at the broken shards on the floor for a few moments, then turns her gaze on him; when his laughter turns into sobbing, she gathers him in her arms and tells him everything's going to be okay.

* * *

He throws away every single painting and vase in the house.

"Well," he chuckles, tossing the last little porcelain urn into the garbage outside. "Artsy Pike isn't going to be too happy."

He pauses.

_Who's Pike?_

And then he remembers.

_Oh_.

* * *

He's scared. He's forgetting things. He's forgetting _people_. People he cares about.

(And Patrick Jane doesn't forget. He just _doesn't_.

Right?)

He thinks that one day he'll wake up and he won't know who he is or where he is. "Perhaps he's experiencing post traumatic order", he hears Abbott whisper to someone one day, and he thinks, _Ah. Finally_.

But then he starts to consider the idea that maybe he's just crazy. They start to worry, more than they already have, his friends – no, _co-workers_. They say he's starting to scare them.

(He might be scaring himself more than he's scaring them. Forgetting is a terrifying thing.)

* * *

He sits in the darkness, a pair of socks held in one hand, and a crumpled piece of paper – a letter, he knows – in the other. "Lisbon," he says to himself, eyes focused on the name written at the beginning of the page, right after the word _Dear, _trying to figure out why it sounds familiar. "Lisbon, Lisbon, Lisbon."

He finally exhales, and then he feels like he can't breathe again because he's forgetting her and she's the one person he's supposed to remember above everyone else.

He scrambles for his phone, finding her number. He hits the call button and waits for voicemail. She never answers anymore, not that he thinks she would. "Lisbon," he gasps into the phone. He spends the next forty five seconds whispering her name, and the next twenty after that staring at the screen until his eyes hurt. The beep sounds, and the line disconnects.

He throws his phone against the wall.

* * *

He starts calling her every night, just to hear her say, "Teresa Lisbon, please leave a message," in a happy voice.

And he does. He leaves message after message.

She never calls back.

* * *

He calls and calls.

"Don't you think it's time to give up?" a man dressed in black asks one day, in a too high-pitched and too-pleasant voice to be asking such a question. He's sprawled on Jane's couch, looking up at him with raised eyebrows and a crooked smile on his face.

He stops, standing still in the middle of the living room, and narrows his eyes. "Uh... who are you, again?"

The man just laughs.

* * *

"Sometimes I forget," he tells a young woman with red hair who has told him her name is Grace.

Grace doesn't say anything, just tugs him closer, and starts his and Lisbon's story from the beginning. "There was once a man named Patrick Jane, and a woman named Teresa Lisbon, who..."

He listens intently, nodding every now and then, hands folded neatly on his lap and eyes never leaving the young woman's face. But when she reaches the part of the story where Patrick Jane has returned from his self-exile and is working with Teresa Lisbon again, she stops, and her eyes begin to water.

She looks down, runs a shaky hand through her bright red hair, and he frowns.

"And then? What happens next?" he asks, voice the slightest bit anxious now.

The woman named Grace shakes her head, and tells him it doesn't matter.

* * *

The same woman, Grace, puts a hand on his shoulder one day and tells him he must never drink tea by himself again. If he wants tea, she says, all he has to do is ask for someone else to make him some.

Something about drugs, she says to a man, later, when she thinks he isn't listening. Something about a beautiful woman – _belladonna_, he thinks she called her.

* * *

He gets an idea.

A truly awful, yet _fantastic_ idea.

Jump, he thinks.

"Jump," the man with the friendly voice whose name he can't quite recall whispers in his ear, a gloved hand resting on his arm. "Jump."

He leaves yet another message on Lisbon's phone. _I'm never going to forget you_.

* * *

He finds himself standing before an old building that is scheduled to be demolished in a week, and before he goes inside a man in an orange uniform tells him he mustn't take long. He promises he won't, and asks the man what the building was used for before being abandoned. He learns that this was once the CBI headquarters, tilts his head back, and everything – _Lisbon_ – comes rushing back. Love. Love? And he remembers. Every detail. The soft lines of her cheeks. The brightness of her gaze. The sweetness of her smile. Her often firm voice and her playful reprimands. The smell of coffee and cinnamon.

He climbs up a flight of creaking stairs, walks through a small, dusky attic and out into the cramped balcony. He keeps the picture of Teresa Lisbon in his mind, and looks down. So far, but so close. Maybe he'll remember the details of everything ever if he falls and hits the ground.

(He's not thinking clearly and later Grace and Cho and Rigsby and everyone else will wonder why she didn't do anything to help him.)

He smiles, eyes closing, heart closing, and there's a peal of voices in his head; two women, a little girl, then two men and another, younger, woman, then a different man, then the little girl again.

He jumps.

* * *

Six minutes and twenty-eight seconds later, Patrick Jane's purposely forgotten phone rings. It's resting on his bedside table, shaking it angrily.

Lisbon's name flashes across the screen, and Marcus Pike is holding her phone to his ear on the other line.

(An ambulance's siren blares in the distance.)

* * *

"We should have told him." Grace's voice is a muffled sob, barely audible in the onslaught of siren noise. "_We should have told him_."

Rigsby pulls her to him, lifts a hand to her hair; Cho stands a few steps beside them, eyes unblinking as he stares up at the abandoned CBI building. "At least now they'll be together."

No one says anything after that.


End file.
